I'm extremely grateful for the inspiration, feedback, and camaraderie of the following list of amazing writers, artists, and organizations. I've traded work with these people, sought advice from them, published with them, and gotten rowdy with them. This is by no means a complete list, but you could spend the next decade getting your mind blown by the work these talented fools are producing.
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Mary Karr's a bad-ass, an award-winning poet, and a best-selling memoirist. She's been a great supporter of ours (Chris used to be her assistant) and we're huge fans of her work. Check out her memoirs, Lit, Cherry, and The Liars' Club. And be on the lookout for her forthcoming book, The Art of Memoir. Website | Facebook | Twitter |
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Phil Klay...this guy, this guy, just look at him. Can you see the genius pouring out of those soulful eyes? National Book Award winner for his brilliant collection of stories, Redeployment and contributor to Fire and Forget. It's been a pleasure and an honor to trade work with Phil for the last five years. War of the Encyclopaedists wouldn't be half the book it is without his valuable insight. Website | Facebook | Twitter |
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Steph Kese and Erin Pollock combine like Voltron to form the unstoppable artist-duo KeseyPollock. They have a special place in my heart as a collaborative team working in Seattle. Their joint work (video art of life-like human sculptures made of wax being melted by blowtorches) is astounding. They're brilliant solo artists as well. Steph Kese's currently at work on a memoir. Erin Pollock is focusing on loose, but boldly rendered portraits and figure drawings. Website | Facebook | Instagram |
I support the following the artists, writers, and organizations because they're dope. You should too.
Prose Writers
David Abrams, vet writer and author of Fobbit, one of the funniest books about Iraq War from the perspective of a soldier whose M-16 is collecting dust while he sits behind the fence, reading Cervantes and Dickens.
Xhenet Aliu, author of Domesticated Wild Things, a taut, absurd, hilarious, and moving book of short stories set in a Connecticut's wretched underbelly, where immigrants, latchkey kids, and amateur wrestlers are fumbling for human connection. Anyone who wants a lesson in how to write a great short story should read this book.
Carmiel Banasky, story writer and author of The Suicide of Claire Bishop, forthcoming from Dzanc Books in Sept. 2015. I'm really excited about this dual-voiced novel that follows a schizophrenic man in 2004 attempting to unravel the mystery of a painting from the 50s, a painting of a woman's suicide. The other narrative follows the life of the woman in the painting, from her divorce in 1959, through the Vietnam protest era, to the present day, where she's suffering from Alzheimers. I've read early drafts--it's ambitious and poetic--and I can't wait to see the finished product.
Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog, a book filled with blindingly poetic language. Reading this book, it's hard not to hate Bill Cheng just a little for his virtuosity with the english sentence. Not to mention the emotional depths he plumbs in crafting an epic of survival and self-discovery that begins with The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles, a deeply felt novel following a child preacher, his falling into faith and out of it, his struggle to resurrect collapsed relationships in adulthood. The language in this book is transfixing and powerful, like the language in Revelations, and he brings those very stakes, the stakes of apocalypse, to the interpersonal dynamics of his characters.
Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, a fascinating book about artificial intelligence and his participation as a human control in a Turing test competition. Each year, AI researches compete to write programs that attempt to fool judges (through a chat interface) into thinking a human is on the other side of the keyboard. The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize for the "Most Human Human." And that's what this book is really about, what it means to be human.
Melissa Falcon Field, author of What Burns Away, a suspenseful and compelling debut novel about domestic malaise, the allure of rekindling dangerous and forgotten romances from adolescence, and of course, fire!--it's chemical and physical causes as well as it's emotional consequences. If you've ever imagined for a split second (and who hasn't?) that an unexpected fire, given the right circumstances, might be more of a solution than a problem, then this book will captivate you.
Matt Gallagher, vet writer and author of Kaboom, a memoir based on his controversial and widely read blog, which the Army shut down in 2008. This book is as funny as it is impactful; it shows the madness of conflict up close, giving readers a taste of the detachment and sarcasm necessary when grappling with something as monstrous and uncontainable as war. Gallagher is also a contributor to Fire and Forget. And look out for his forthcoming novel, YoungBlood.
Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, a dazzling, absurd, and hilarious debut novel about a filipino immigrant, whose dream of making it big in the world of high fashion is cut short when he's thrown into Guantanamo, accused of involvement in a terrorist plot. Gilvarry was 5 under 35 honoree in 2014, and for good reason. His writing is poetic, witty, and aimed at the heart.
Amy Jo Burns, author of Cinderland, a searing memoir about the consequences of keeping quit in the midst of small-town scandal. Burns paints Mercury, Pennsylvania with a subtle and confident voice, opening readers to its history of industrial collapse through the lens of adolescent romantic exploration. This sets the stage for the revelation that will propel you through the rest of the book: the town's piano teacher is accused of sexually assaulting his female students. The girls who come forward are ostracized. Burns lies, and must deal with psychological fallout.
Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front, the definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement. The gender landscape changed in 90s with the rise of feminist punk bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Sara Marcus was there, and she melds her own experience with research and interviews to provide a fascinating and nuanced account of the Riot Grrrl movement and its lasting effects on our culture.
Sarah McCarry, author of All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, and the forthcoming About a Girl, a trilogy of novels set in the Pacific Northwest. With haunting and poetic prose, McCarry immerses the reader in a tale of adolescent friendship and love that takes on mythical stakes (see Orpheus and Persephone) with punk and goth and bit a of magic.
Kevin Moffett, author of brilliant short story collections Further Interpretations of Real Life Events and Permanent Visitors (winner of the Iowa prize). Moffett's stories are somehow able to play in the meta realm without refusing honest sentiment, they engage emotionally and intellectually like the best DFW stories. He's also the joint-author (with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby) of The Silent History, a novel about how society deals with an epidemic of children born without the ability to speak, children who grow up and form their own silent communities.
Jason Porter, author of Why Are You So Sad?, is perhaps the funniest book ever written about sadness. The novel follows an illustrator of assembly manuals for an Ikea-like company. He's convinced that the world has fallen into a bout of depression and that something's got to be done. But first, he decides to confirm his suspicion by making a questionnaire that focuses on existential woe and passing it out to his co-workers. It's a depressing and hilarious premise that Porter more than fulfills, writing a book that is also redemptive. "Forward half a step. Backward half a step. Pause. Look bewildered by own brokenness. Repeat until death."
Roy Scranton, vet writer and contributor to Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and the New York Times, among many other publications. Scranton has a keen intellect and he writes elegantly about war, politics, and climate change. As a fiction writer, he was an editor and contributor to Fire and Forget. You can find his nonfiction in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2014. And be on the look out for Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, forthcoming from City Lights Books in 2015.
Susanna Sonnenberg, author of the memoirs Her Last Death and She Matters: a Life in Friendships. In Her Last Death, Sonnenberg explores her relationship with her complicated mother (who gave her a copy of Penthouse at age 10, cocaine at 12!). She Matters delves into the many female friendships that have come and gone in her life. Both these books are testament to the fact that the personal is universal. They are riveting and deeply insightful, and they drive home the truth that gratitude and forgiveness are the wisest way to handle the constant loss that comes with being a social creature.
Poets
Jeremy Bass, musician and poet. Check out his first solo album, Tenant. The kind of lyrics you can expect from a talented poet with a great ear for sentence rhythm.
Mark Conway, author of the poetry collections Dreaming Man, Face Down and Any Holy City, which achieves and strange and admirable sense of divine nihilism. The work is equally devotional and sarcastic, solemn and hilarious. Check out some of his work here.
Louise Gluck. You already know how dope she is. Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award. She can do in five lines what many of other poets takes pages or books to accomplish. Read her latest, Faithful and Virtuous Night.
Joe Hall, author of several books, most recently The Devotional Poems.
Terrence Hayes, author of four poetry collections, most recently the blindingly brilliant Lighthead. This guy is the Kendrick Lamar of contemporary poetry. He doesn't pull punches, he has an amazing ear for the language and he controls it masterfully, but he's humble, he's open and generous with his interpretations of reality.
Richard Kenney, author of four poetry collections, most recently The One-Strand River. No other poets writes quite like Kenney, whose work is formally rigorous, experimental, playful, funny, scientifically invested, philosohpically insightful, restrained, and extremely felt, all at once. One of my favorite poets. He inducted Gavin and I into the world of poetry when we met in Rome.
Mark Leidner, author of Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover. I first encountered Leidner's work years ago, before he ever had a book published. He manages to reach for deep human truths through deadpan humor and absurdity.
Jan Heller Levi, author of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, SkySpeak, and Orphan, which explores love and loneliness, at times making the reader uncomfortable, at times eliciting guilty laughter.
Bojan Louis, co-editor of Waxwing, widely published in many genres, member of the Navajo Nation, Metal aficionado.
Donna Masini, author of two poetry collections, That Kind of Danger and Turning to Fiction:Poems, and a novel, About Yvonne. Masini's work is both overflowing like Whitman and tightly wrought like Lousie Gluck. Rare to find a writer with such a deep knowledge of poetic craft, the nuts and bolts of various syntactic techniques, whose work seems filled with spontaneous bursts of emotion.
Ashley Anna McHugh, author of the formally masterful Into These Knots.
Heather McHugh, author of eight poetry collections, most recently Upgraded to Serious. Chris is a huge fan of her work, especially Eyeshot. McHugh is a walking etymology dictionary who tinkers with the building blocks of English in a delightful way. She's also a MacArthur Genius and she used her award money to found a charitable organization, Caregifted, which provides respite for longterm family caregivers of the disabled.
Tomas Q. Morin, author of A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman prize, which Tom Sleigh calls "infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne." I agree. Morin has also published a new translation of Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu.
Ariana Nadia Nash, author of Instructions for Preparing Your Skin. Nash is a poet of the body, like Neruda, like Whitman, but her poems don't move with Neruda’s desire-driven caprice, nor do they swell with Whitman’s electric and expansive equation of body and soul. Rather, they proceed with the structured precision of a surgeon.
Michelle Peñaloza, author of Landscape/Heartbreak, a book of poems that maps heartbreak throughout Seattle. Peñaloza asked people to take her on walks to specific places in Seattle where they had their hearts broken, then she wrote poems and created maps based on the conversations she had. A fascinating and moving project. Look for her forthcoming chapbook, Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes.
Zach Savich, author of four poetry collections, most recently, Century Swept Brutal. Dean Young says of Savich's work, "Imagine an expansive heart and mind speaking back to crows in Crow." An apt image. Savich's poems are sharply intelligent, playful, and they live just beyond the bounds of understanding.
Alan Shapiro, author of a dozen poetry collections, most recently Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic, which will forever change the way you look at gas-station bathrooms. Shapiro is a hilarious guy who writes serious poems, which is itself a moving joke.
Tom Sleigh, prolific poet, author of, most recently, Station Zed, his best and most important book to date. What's truly scary about the way Sleigh portrays his weighty subject matter (see: terrorism, genocide) is that those terrible things aren't as rare as we'd like to imagine, they're as daily as diet coke. Lesser poets fall into cynicism or honest sentiment when facing the truly horrifying. Sleigh succeeds where they fail by choosing to flirt with the abyss--he is cynical and full of pathos at the same time. The subjects he's writing about matter in a very real way--but he's still able to joke about them.
Artists, filmmakers, Musicians
Jackie Branson makes crazy and intimidating sculptures, often featuring giant saw blades welded into new aesthetic purposes, forming boxes and oriental rugs, for example.
Sam Green is a documentary film maker who pioneered the live documentary with The Measure of All Things about the Guinness Book of World Records, and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which featured live music by Yo La Tengo and Live narration by Green.
Gabriel Kahane's major label debut, The Ambassador looks at the underbelly of Los Angeles though music that is sonically varied and inspired by detective fiction, modernist architecture and race riots.
Erin Kendig is an artist, illustrator and designer living in Seattle. Her works is incredibly intricate, spare, and bold, and able to create a sense of massive scale in a small space.
Frank Magnotta does insane and finely rendered pencil portraits of grotesquely cartoonish figures. They are frightening, especially because there is deeply human at the heart of these monstrous faces.
Brittany Powell is always having fun with her work, something I greatly admire. She plays with food, crafts, and commercial products to make art that is both clever and thought-provoking.
Studio Swine is a collaborative design partnership between Architect Azusa Murakami and Artist Alexander Groves. They make products that take into account the culture and resources of particular regions. They've made chairs from recycled plastic floating in oceanic gyres, portable aluminum smelters powered by discarded kitchen grease, and combs and jewelry made from resin and human hair. Their work is always beautiful and conceptually interesting.
Erin Thurlow is deeply interested in jokes and how their structure can influence visual art. His work plays with spatial and physical expectations, upending them to create art that isn't jokey, but rather art that provides aesthetic pleasure in the way jokes provide humor.
Brian Willmont's art explores the conjunction of geometric patterns and psychedelic colors, sometimes verging on the disorientation felt when confronting certain optical illusions. Highly structured and fragmented at the same time, the work is often mesmerizing. He aslo runs theGreenpoint Terminal Gallery.
Organizations
Hirschworth, a crazy magazine run by the inimitable renaissance men Thomas McCafferty and Richard Armstrong. It features poetry, fiction, essays, art, fashion, and food.
THEthe Poetry is a great blog about poetics that features new poems, essays, and reviews. Chris is a sometimes contributor. THEthe is run, in part, by Micah Towery, author of the poetry collection Whale of Desire.
Bright Ideas is a next level cinema magazine run by James Kaelan, director of Eel and author of We're Getting On. Chris has contributed several essays to the magazine.
The Veterans Book Project is a library of books authored collaboratively by artist/writer Monica Haller and dozens of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prose Writers
David Abrams, vet writer and author of Fobbit, one of the funniest books about Iraq War from the perspective of a soldier whose M-16 is collecting dust while he sits behind the fence, reading Cervantes and Dickens.
Xhenet Aliu, author of Domesticated Wild Things, a taut, absurd, hilarious, and moving book of short stories set in a Connecticut's wretched underbelly, where immigrants, latchkey kids, and amateur wrestlers are fumbling for human connection. Anyone who wants a lesson in how to write a great short story should read this book.
Carmiel Banasky, story writer and author of The Suicide of Claire Bishop, forthcoming from Dzanc Books in Sept. 2015. I'm really excited about this dual-voiced novel that follows a schizophrenic man in 2004 attempting to unravel the mystery of a painting from the 50s, a painting of a woman's suicide. The other narrative follows the life of the woman in the painting, from her divorce in 1959, through the Vietnam protest era, to the present day, where she's suffering from Alzheimers. I've read early drafts--it's ambitious and poetic--and I can't wait to see the finished product.
Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog, a book filled with blindingly poetic language. Reading this book, it's hard not to hate Bill Cheng just a little for his virtuosity with the english sentence. Not to mention the emotional depths he plumbs in crafting an epic of survival and self-discovery that begins with The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles, a deeply felt novel following a child preacher, his falling into faith and out of it, his struggle to resurrect collapsed relationships in adulthood. The language in this book is transfixing and powerful, like the language in Revelations, and he brings those very stakes, the stakes of apocalypse, to the interpersonal dynamics of his characters.
Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, a fascinating book about artificial intelligence and his participation as a human control in a Turing test competition. Each year, AI researches compete to write programs that attempt to fool judges (through a chat interface) into thinking a human is on the other side of the keyboard. The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize for the "Most Human Human." And that's what this book is really about, what it means to be human.
Melissa Falcon Field, author of What Burns Away, a suspenseful and compelling debut novel about domestic malaise, the allure of rekindling dangerous and forgotten romances from adolescence, and of course, fire!--it's chemical and physical causes as well as it's emotional consequences. If you've ever imagined for a split second (and who hasn't?) that an unexpected fire, given the right circumstances, might be more of a solution than a problem, then this book will captivate you.
Matt Gallagher, vet writer and author of Kaboom, a memoir based on his controversial and widely read blog, which the Army shut down in 2008. This book is as funny as it is impactful; it shows the madness of conflict up close, giving readers a taste of the detachment and sarcasm necessary when grappling with something as monstrous and uncontainable as war. Gallagher is also a contributor to Fire and Forget. And look out for his forthcoming novel, YoungBlood.
Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, a dazzling, absurd, and hilarious debut novel about a filipino immigrant, whose dream of making it big in the world of high fashion is cut short when he's thrown into Guantanamo, accused of involvement in a terrorist plot. Gilvarry was 5 under 35 honoree in 2014, and for good reason. His writing is poetic, witty, and aimed at the heart.
Amy Jo Burns, author of Cinderland, a searing memoir about the consequences of keeping quit in the midst of small-town scandal. Burns paints Mercury, Pennsylvania with a subtle and confident voice, opening readers to its history of industrial collapse through the lens of adolescent romantic exploration. This sets the stage for the revelation that will propel you through the rest of the book: the town's piano teacher is accused of sexually assaulting his female students. The girls who come forward are ostracized. Burns lies, and must deal with psychological fallout.
Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front, the definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement. The gender landscape changed in 90s with the rise of feminist punk bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Sara Marcus was there, and she melds her own experience with research and interviews to provide a fascinating and nuanced account of the Riot Grrrl movement and its lasting effects on our culture.
Sarah McCarry, author of All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, and the forthcoming About a Girl, a trilogy of novels set in the Pacific Northwest. With haunting and poetic prose, McCarry immerses the reader in a tale of adolescent friendship and love that takes on mythical stakes (see Orpheus and Persephone) with punk and goth and bit a of magic.
Kevin Moffett, author of brilliant short story collections Further Interpretations of Real Life Events and Permanent Visitors (winner of the Iowa prize). Moffett's stories are somehow able to play in the meta realm without refusing honest sentiment, they engage emotionally and intellectually like the best DFW stories. He's also the joint-author (with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby) of The Silent History, a novel about how society deals with an epidemic of children born without the ability to speak, children who grow up and form their own silent communities.
Jason Porter, author of Why Are You So Sad?, is perhaps the funniest book ever written about sadness. The novel follows an illustrator of assembly manuals for an Ikea-like company. He's convinced that the world has fallen into a bout of depression and that something's got to be done. But first, he decides to confirm his suspicion by making a questionnaire that focuses on existential woe and passing it out to his co-workers. It's a depressing and hilarious premise that Porter more than fulfills, writing a book that is also redemptive. "Forward half a step. Backward half a step. Pause. Look bewildered by own brokenness. Repeat until death."
Roy Scranton, vet writer and contributor to Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and the New York Times, among many other publications. Scranton has a keen intellect and he writes elegantly about war, politics, and climate change. As a fiction writer, he was an editor and contributor to Fire and Forget. You can find his nonfiction in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2014. And be on the look out for Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, forthcoming from City Lights Books in 2015.
Susanna Sonnenberg, author of the memoirs Her Last Death and She Matters: a Life in Friendships. In Her Last Death, Sonnenberg explores her relationship with her complicated mother (who gave her a copy of Penthouse at age 10, cocaine at 12!). She Matters delves into the many female friendships that have come and gone in her life. Both these books are testament to the fact that the personal is universal. They are riveting and deeply insightful, and they drive home the truth that gratitude and forgiveness are the wisest way to handle the constant loss that comes with being a social creature.
Poets
Jeremy Bass, musician and poet. Check out his first solo album, Tenant. The kind of lyrics you can expect from a talented poet with a great ear for sentence rhythm.
Mark Conway, author of the poetry collections Dreaming Man, Face Down and Any Holy City, which achieves and strange and admirable sense of divine nihilism. The work is equally devotional and sarcastic, solemn and hilarious. Check out some of his work here.
Louise Gluck. You already know how dope she is. Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award. She can do in five lines what many of other poets takes pages or books to accomplish. Read her latest, Faithful and Virtuous Night.
Joe Hall, author of several books, most recently The Devotional Poems.
Terrence Hayes, author of four poetry collections, most recently the blindingly brilliant Lighthead. This guy is the Kendrick Lamar of contemporary poetry. He doesn't pull punches, he has an amazing ear for the language and he controls it masterfully, but he's humble, he's open and generous with his interpretations of reality.
Richard Kenney, author of four poetry collections, most recently The One-Strand River. No other poets writes quite like Kenney, whose work is formally rigorous, experimental, playful, funny, scientifically invested, philosohpically insightful, restrained, and extremely felt, all at once. One of my favorite poets. He inducted Gavin and I into the world of poetry when we met in Rome.
Mark Leidner, author of Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover. I first encountered Leidner's work years ago, before he ever had a book published. He manages to reach for deep human truths through deadpan humor and absurdity.
Jan Heller Levi, author of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, SkySpeak, and Orphan, which explores love and loneliness, at times making the reader uncomfortable, at times eliciting guilty laughter.
Bojan Louis, co-editor of Waxwing, widely published in many genres, member of the Navajo Nation, Metal aficionado.
Donna Masini, author of two poetry collections, That Kind of Danger and Turning to Fiction:Poems, and a novel, About Yvonne. Masini's work is both overflowing like Whitman and tightly wrought like Lousie Gluck. Rare to find a writer with such a deep knowledge of poetic craft, the nuts and bolts of various syntactic techniques, whose work seems filled with spontaneous bursts of emotion.
Ashley Anna McHugh, author of the formally masterful Into These Knots.
Heather McHugh, author of eight poetry collections, most recently Upgraded to Serious. Chris is a huge fan of her work, especially Eyeshot. McHugh is a walking etymology dictionary who tinkers with the building blocks of English in a delightful way. She's also a MacArthur Genius and she used her award money to found a charitable organization, Caregifted, which provides respite for longterm family caregivers of the disabled.
Tomas Q. Morin, author of A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman prize, which Tom Sleigh calls "infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne." I agree. Morin has also published a new translation of Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu.
Ariana Nadia Nash, author of Instructions for Preparing Your Skin. Nash is a poet of the body, like Neruda, like Whitman, but her poems don't move with Neruda’s desire-driven caprice, nor do they swell with Whitman’s electric and expansive equation of body and soul. Rather, they proceed with the structured precision of a surgeon.
Michelle Peñaloza, author of Landscape/Heartbreak, a book of poems that maps heartbreak throughout Seattle. Peñaloza asked people to take her on walks to specific places in Seattle where they had their hearts broken, then she wrote poems and created maps based on the conversations she had. A fascinating and moving project. Look for her forthcoming chapbook, Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes.
Zach Savich, author of four poetry collections, most recently, Century Swept Brutal. Dean Young says of Savich's work, "Imagine an expansive heart and mind speaking back to crows in Crow." An apt image. Savich's poems are sharply intelligent, playful, and they live just beyond the bounds of understanding.
Alan Shapiro, author of a dozen poetry collections, most recently Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic, which will forever change the way you look at gas-station bathrooms. Shapiro is a hilarious guy who writes serious poems, which is itself a moving joke.
Tom Sleigh, prolific poet, author of, most recently, Station Zed, his best and most important book to date. What's truly scary about the way Sleigh portrays his weighty subject matter (see: terrorism, genocide) is that those terrible things aren't as rare as we'd like to imagine, they're as daily as diet coke. Lesser poets fall into cynicism or honest sentiment when facing the truly horrifying. Sleigh succeeds where they fail by choosing to flirt with the abyss--he is cynical and full of pathos at the same time. The subjects he's writing about matter in a very real way--but he's still able to joke about them.
Artists, filmmakers, Musicians
Jackie Branson makes crazy and intimidating sculptures, often featuring giant saw blades welded into new aesthetic purposes, forming boxes and oriental rugs, for example.
Sam Green is a documentary film maker who pioneered the live documentary with The Measure of All Things about the Guinness Book of World Records, and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which featured live music by Yo La Tengo and Live narration by Green.
Gabriel Kahane's major label debut, The Ambassador looks at the underbelly of Los Angeles though music that is sonically varied and inspired by detective fiction, modernist architecture and race riots.
Erin Kendig is an artist, illustrator and designer living in Seattle. Her works is incredibly intricate, spare, and bold, and able to create a sense of massive scale in a small space.
Frank Magnotta does insane and finely rendered pencil portraits of grotesquely cartoonish figures. They are frightening, especially because there is deeply human at the heart of these monstrous faces.
Brittany Powell is always having fun with her work, something I greatly admire. She plays with food, crafts, and commercial products to make art that is both clever and thought-provoking.
Studio Swine is a collaborative design partnership between Architect Azusa Murakami and Artist Alexander Groves. They make products that take into account the culture and resources of particular regions. They've made chairs from recycled plastic floating in oceanic gyres, portable aluminum smelters powered by discarded kitchen grease, and combs and jewelry made from resin and human hair. Their work is always beautiful and conceptually interesting.
Erin Thurlow is deeply interested in jokes and how their structure can influence visual art. His work plays with spatial and physical expectations, upending them to create art that isn't jokey, but rather art that provides aesthetic pleasure in the way jokes provide humor.
Brian Willmont's art explores the conjunction of geometric patterns and psychedelic colors, sometimes verging on the disorientation felt when confronting certain optical illusions. Highly structured and fragmented at the same time, the work is often mesmerizing. He aslo runs theGreenpoint Terminal Gallery.
Organizations
Hirschworth, a crazy magazine run by the inimitable renaissance men Thomas McCafferty and Richard Armstrong. It features poetry, fiction, essays, art, fashion, and food.
THEthe Poetry is a great blog about poetics that features new poems, essays, and reviews. Chris is a sometimes contributor. THEthe is run, in part, by Micah Towery, author of the poetry collection Whale of Desire.
Bright Ideas is a next level cinema magazine run by James Kaelan, director of Eel and author of We're Getting On. Chris has contributed several essays to the magazine.
The Veterans Book Project is a library of books authored collaboratively by artist/writer Monica Haller and dozens of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.